1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to wireless communications and in particular to timing advance in wireless communications.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a Long Term Evolution (LTE) communication system, the evolved Node B (eNB) or base station can initiate a timing advance on behalf of the network to compensate for changing distance between the user equipment (UE) and the base station. If the UE is transmitting during the timing advance command, the UE must maintain the old timing until a given subframe, and the UE must apply an instantaneous advance at the beginning of a next subframe. Fundamentally, this movement results in a loss of samples and also results in a loss of time for the UE to compute a full transmit orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (TX OFDM) symbol. The resulting loss of samples, however, does not reduce the amount of computation required for OFDM, as the UE still computes the full symbol and then drops the samples as necessary to comply with the timing advance command. In order to handle this timing advance scenario, a faster clock or duplication of hardware is commonly needed.